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4 comments for “Episode 72: Sexual Assault in Star Trek: Part I”

Queer Trekker

November 19, 2017 at 5:48 pm

made some great points guys, and yeah there was a lot of this in a lot of television. The most annoying and damaging I think was in Soaps. So much of it in soaps (ug), and story tellers should be held accountable for what they write. There is a fascinating/disturbing/enlightening article you all should look at, if you havn’t already, that I read for a uni class called “Taming the Victim: Rape in Soap Opeera” by Mary Buhl Dutta. its an older article but i think very relaitable to the topic of your discussion.

Thank you. It is not Star Trek,but I was very uncomfortable watching the scene in Bladerunner when Decker forces himself on Ratchel,making her say she wanted him.It seems they thought it was sexy and she wanted it.But the look on bothe their faces said it all.

I almost wonder if “Violations” could warrant an episode-length discussion — there are so many interesting points raised here that could use fleshing out. After all, it is not one of these episodes in which rape is used as a kind of minor incident… it is trying (successfully or otherwise) to take on rape as its central subject. Yet the sexual scenario of Troi’s violation (and to a lesser extent Crusher’s too) feels like an unnecessary provocation; it’s telling that only Riker is allowed a nightmarish memory of something that happened during his professional life. It is an oddly constructed episode, since it tips its hand that Jev is the villain near the beginning and has us watch the characters pursue the wrong culprit instead (in this respect it resembles some earlier TNG episodes like “The Schizoid Man,” in which we watch the characters be idiots for four acts); there’s also the fact that Picard’s “evil within us all” style speech at the end, while welcome for avoiding a “bad apple” mentality, skirts the real issues, like masculinity and power. And when it shows Troi fighting back against Jev with everything at her disposal, it perhaps feels less like some kind of weird I Spit On Your Grave misguided revenge fantasy than we see later in Nemesis.